zedz wrote:Flame and Woman / Impasse
A further intensification of the Yoshida / Okada collaboration. These last three films seem to form a unit distinct from A Story Written with Water: they’re exploring ideas of women’s freedom, and the films orbit around Mariko Okada as an alienated wife. Story was less intently focussed on Okada, she was a mother rather than a wife, and the issues treated were different.
The relationship of this film to The Affair seems to be particularly close. It’s the director’s first original screenplay for a while, but it is built on ideas, images and settings from the previous film. When the couple share confessional flashbacks, his (an encounter with a dead child) uses similar compositions, similar blocking, silence and the same lens as the visions of the mother’s death in The Affair; hers (a sexual assault by a rough labourer) mimicks the sexual assault in the earlier film, and is incongruously accompanied by the sounds of the sea (surf, seagulls) that Yoshida removed from the parallel scene in The Affair. It’s almost as if the past of this couple is the past of Yoshida’s cinema. There are other matched scenes as well (e.g. Okada hiding in the bathroom from an intruder).
The new element here is artificial insemination and anxiety / uncertainty over paternity. It’s almost as if Yoshida decided to explore those ideas (and the ways in which new reproductive technologies impacted on women’s freedom) by simply adding this element to a pre-exisiting set of variables (characters, milieu, settings, style).
Yoshida’s style continues to evolve. We’re now seeing him use large foreground objects to block off our view of characters or interrupt tableaux. There’s also extensive use in this film of prowling, circling handheld camera, which counterpoints the asymmetrical (or, in some cases, oppressively symmetrical, with central vanishing points) static compositions elsewhere.
His use of sound is even more outré, though perhaps not as eerie, as in The Affair: incongruous sound effects in the place of naturalistic sound are the order of the day, including the repeated use of an abrasive noise like something being rubbed against the mike, or a particularly nasty old-vinyl crackle. In a shocking vision in which Ritsuko smothers her own baby, the action is accompanied by the flapping and cawing of birds. Another sequence is accompanied by what sounds a bit like somebody in an iron lung playing Pong. The score (Teizo Matsumura, this time, not a name I’m familiar with) is an odd, Liska-esque wordless vocal one that functions as another layer of disjunctive sound.
The flashback structure in Flame and Woman is even denser and less overtly signalled than in the foregoing films, and it required greater attention to follow the back-and-forth shuttling of the narrative (particularly as the scenes also included projections and memories extrinsic to the main story and a couple of baby-POV sequences). An audacious, provocative film that’s gagging for another viewing.
Also on this disc is a substantial retrospective documentary that goes through Yoshida’s life and work at a fair clip, functioning as an extended ad for the sets in Carlotta’s ‘Complete Works’ series (it’s broken up into segments that relate to the different box sets). On the basis of how this is divided up, we can expect the three seventies features plus Farewell to the Summer Light (and maybe one version of Eros + Massacre) in the next box. The Beauty of Beauty TV series might also get in there, but that would be about 9 hours. His three 80s/90s/00s features would make up the last box, probably along with his Ozu and Dream of Cinema docs. Actually, if we’re assuming two more four-disc boxes, I don’t see how Beauty of Beauty could fit – unless, of course, Carlotta are planning a fifth box dedicated to his television / documentary work.
Affair in the Snow
This 1968 film is quite distinct from the sort-of trilogy that preceded it. For one (big) thing, it’s quite linear. It also has a more classical visual syntax and more naturalistic sound, and score: the film relies heavily on its whimsical theme tune. There are some typical tropes: the threatening lake, the fateful train (also a key site / motif in The Lake, The Affair and Flame and Woman), the bad but inescapable marital relationship. But in most respects this is a companion piece to Akitsu Hot Springs: a comparatively straightforward romantic melodrama that gives the traditional form a couple of crucial twists (extremely deep and dark obsession, the plot device of impotence).
It’s kind of a surprise to see Yoshida return to his earlier success, but it affords a kind of liberation. How much further could he have gone with the concerns of the previous three films without repeating himself? In many repects his later films, specifically Eros Plus Massacre, are more extreme stylistically, but they also head in quite different directions.
The film is made compelling by Yoshida’s brilliant eye. The dramatic encounters unfold in a series of amazing shots in amazing landscapes: a lake dominated by a mountain; a foundry; a snowbound resort; the stark mountain slopes. Although the narrative has the same three-way character structure as the three previous films (Mariko Okada, her husband, and the Other Man), the roles here are more balanced and there’s less a sense of seeing the world of the film through Okada’s character, so the film’s dynamic is quite different.
Eros + Massacre
I actually watched this a while back, in preparation for the 70s list, but I should add a few comments here for completion’s sake. It’s a tough, dense, powerful film, and it’s now available in its elusive original cut. These discs are probably the current frontrunner for single-film release of the year.
The two versions are much more different than I’d imagined. Because the excised material all relates to a particular character, its reinstatement radically alters the balance and structure of the finished film. In the shorter cut, the modern and historical aspects of the film are more evenly matched: in the full-length version, the modern scenes read much more as a frame or commentary. They’re more subordinate, but in a way that actually draws greater attention to their function in relation to the historical material.
Similarly, the historical material in the short version is strongly focussed on Noe Ito, with Osugi’s wife Yasuko and lover Itsuko as secondary figures; in the long version, Noe is balanced by Itsuko. Consequently, the early feminist angle is much more thoroughly explored, and the character dynamics more fully expressed, as opposed to the women’s relationships being mediated through Osugi.
Just a few points about
Affair in the Snow: overall, it reminded me of nothing so much as Claude Lelouch's "A Man And A Woman", which I didn't particularly care for.
Naturally, Yoshida's film is so much darker in mood and tone
I can't imagine that he would have been influenced by Rohmer, at least not by the Rohmer films I've seen, but he has consistently made great use of natural backgrounds, of widescreen, where he likes to shoot from a distance to give a broad perspective on the protagonists background , and its yet another very effective score, albeit that it mostly consists of a repetition of a simple musical phrase
(this time its 60's lounge music, which is
very apt: not at all unlike the music for Melville's 'Bob Le Flambeur', although its use was more ironic in the latter case).
This second boxset is proving to be not only superior to the first: hardly surprising, in view of the director's increasing maturity, if not that they all feature his wife in lead roles, but also one of my very favourite box-sets.
And thats really saying something.
I can see myself revisiting the complete set many times
Interesting choice of title for the set: 'Contre Le Melodrame', literally, 'against the melodrama': I suspect it may be that he set out to subvert the traditional Hollywood melodrama/'Woman's Picture', whatever about contemporary Japanese conventions.